April 21, 2014 • 23 mins
The story of the Batavia is a perfect storm of nautical carnage: There's a shipwreck, a mutiny and a massacre. This first of two parts deals with the the first part of the voyage, the shipwreck and the rescue mission. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. So we have our second shipwreck story
and as many weeks, and the Batavia was not just
(00:24):
a shipwreck. It's a shipwreck and a mutiny and also
a massacre. So this perfect storm of nautical carnage. Yeah,
there's a lot going on. Yeah, as you were researching,
Tracy would keeping some messages is like, this is crazy
because everything knew she would uncover would add another layer
(00:47):
of infanity to it. Yeah, it's it just escalates and escalates.
And there are a couple of notes that we're going
to just lay out in the beginning, and the first
is the names in this episode. So the main cast
of characters in the story came from what's now the
Netherlands and Belgium. And at this point in history, the
Dutch didn't generally use surnames the way most of us
are used to today. Instead of established surnames that were
(01:11):
passed down through the family and stayed the same, people
had patronymic names which came from their father's first names.
So Adrian Jacobs, who was our ship's skipper was Jacob's
son Adrian, and his father would have been Yacob somebody
else's son. Uh. But then our ship's upper merchant um
(01:34):
Francisco Pelser. He was from Antwerp, and he had a
more typical family surname that we would expect to see today,
which was Pelser. So for the sake of consistency, we're
just going to call everybody the equivalent of what their
surname was, because it gets a little confusing. The other
note is that you may notice as you are listening
to this episode and the next one, because the story
(01:55):
is so big, it's in two parts. Um. The number
of passengers and crew on the Ovat, these numbers don't
seem to quite add up all the time, and this
is because as the voyage went on, people were born,
other people died. Sometimes crew just went a wall. When
the ship would stop to take on supplies somewhere, people
would just decide they were done with this mess and
(02:17):
they would go away. Um. Even the starting number of
people on board is not totally clear because there were
some last minute no shows and people who just never
reported for duties. So if you're if you're doing the
math on this episode and you kind of go with
this numbers these don't You just don't sink that is why.
So today's episode is going to be about the first
(02:38):
part of the voyage, the shipwreck, and the rescue mission
that happened afterwards, and then our next episode will be
about sort of what happened to the survivors while their
bosses were away trying to get help. Ready, yeah, okay,
so this whole story starts with the Dutch East India
Company or in Dutch the verenegda Ostendesa Company. I practiced
(03:03):
that I probably still did not say it perfectly, So
we're just going to call them the v o C,
which is what that boils down to. So the v
C was dominating trade in the East Indies, which is
basically Indonesia and the surrounding islands in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It became this political and commercial powerhouse, and
it sent ships from the Netherlands to Asia to buy
(03:24):
things like spices and silk and then to return to
Europe to sell them. And the v C was headquartered
in Batavia, which is what's now Jakarta in Indonesia. One
of the v o C s ships, which was also
called the Batavia, left Tessel Holland on its maiden voyage
to Batavia in October of sixty eight, and its cargo
included an enormous amount of silver and jewels. The ship
(03:46):
also carried materials for a gatehouse which was to be
built at v O C headquarters. In command of the
Batavia was the upper Merchant, also called the Supercargo, and
this was a man named Francisco Pelsert, and he was
one of the most experienced merchants in the Dutch East
in the India Company's fleet. He was also very fond
of women and money, and at one point, sort of
(04:09):
extraneous to this story, set himself up as a money lender,
using company funds while charging people extremely steep interest. This
was something that was discovered after the end of the
Batavia's story, but it kind of clues you in to
a little about this man's character. Willing to misappropriate company funds,
(04:29):
that's no problem, right. Next in command was the ship's skipper,
Adrian Jacobs, who was a sea captain with more than
twenty years of experience, and he was in a rather
awkward leadership position because in any other nautical context he
would be the one ultimately in charge. However, on a
V O C ship he reported up to the upper merchant,
(04:50):
who was a merchant and not a seaman. This is
pretty much how things worked in most of the big
trading companies. You would have somebody who was ultimately in charge,
whose job was to safeguard the financial interests of the company.
Everyone ultimately reported to this person, even though this person
did not necessarily know how to sail a ship. So
(05:12):
that led to some headbutting in many contexts, not just
this one. I imagine we have um several listeners at
the moment thinking that this is very similar to some
corporate cultures. Yeah, not ours, I'm happy to report, but
it does happen. I mean I've certainly been in companies
where the person in charge it doesn't really know how
anything works. Yeah. I attempt one time for a company
(05:35):
where there was somebody who was in charge of I
T who had a history degree and they had been
hired because he was a people manager. But the people
who were working in I found that very frustrating. So
Jacobs and Pelser had actually sailed together before, and they
had never really gotten along, and their headbutting only got
worse after this incident, on a voyage where Pelser was
traveling as a guest, Jacobs had gotten extremely drunk and
(05:58):
insulted him in a very loud old way, and that
ship's upper merchant had given Jacobs a really public reprimand,
and Jacobs always blamed Pelsert for having gotten him dressed
down in front of everybody. Always a good relationship to
start along voyage with. Always good to blame other people
for your own behavior. Third in command was the under merchant,
(06:22):
Uronymous Cornelis, who had very little experience at see and
we'll talk a little bit more about his backstory as
we go on, because it becomes really really relevant later
on in the tale. Yeah, his his story is is
really relevant to part two, So it's in part two
of the episode. Gotch So. Also on board the Batavia
(06:42):
were about three and forty other people, and about two
thirds of them were officers and crew of the ship.
They're also about a hundred soldiers along with some civilians
seeking passage to the Indies, and some of these were
women and children. These were mostly families of voc employees
or other people who were going to join their family
in the Indian ease and before we talk about the
(07:03):
voyage itself, shall we take a moment and talk about
a word from our sponsor, Capital Idea. And now we
will get back to the journey of the Batavia. The
Batavia left Tessil in a convoy of seven ships, but
at the very start of the voyage they went through
a huge storm in the North Sea and most of
the ships lost sight of each other. Only three of
(07:23):
them managed to find one another again. Once the weather
had improved, the Batavia, ass and dev and the Burin
sailed on together towards South Africa. These three ships made
really good time. They got to the Cape of Good
Hope an entire month ahead of schedule. But on board
the Batavia, the under merchant Cord Cornelis and the shipper
(07:45):
Yakubs started to conspire to commit mutiny um. They also
drew the ship's high Boson into their plot as well,
and so as the ship departed from South Africa, in
order to further their plan of mutiny, Jacobs deliberately steered
the ship away from the two remaining ones in the convoy,
and so the Batavia wounded up going on the rest
(08:06):
of its journey alone. And then during the last stretch
of the Batavia's route northward through the Indian Ocean, Upper
Merchant Pelser became seriously ill and had to be confined
to his cabin under the care of the surgeon Franz Yawns.
At this point, Jacobs and Cornelis put their plotting on hold.
They were kind of enjoying Pelsart's absence and biding their
(08:28):
time and waiting to see if he would just die
and leave the ship in their hands. They weren't sort
of an interesting attitude to have about it. They weren't
going to have to put the effort into staging a
mutiny if the you know, the Upper Merchant was just
gonna die. Yeah, it takes some work. Yeah, so uh
sadly thwarting their plans. Eventually, Pelser recovered, and when it
(08:50):
became clear that he was going to live, Jacobs and
Cornelis realized that they had wasted some time and getting
their whole mutiny plan off the ground. They hadn't recruited
an enough men to physically take over the ship from
the people who would be loyal to the Upper Merchant,
so they decided to have another ploy. They conspired to
have a wealthy female passenger named Lucretia Yawns or you
(09:14):
all also see her name as Lucretia Vandermilion, which was
her husband's last name. They conspired to have her sexually
assaulted by masked members of the crew, and Jans was
traveling to Batavia to join her husband, and her station
was high enough that she had one of the best
cabins on the ship and her own maid. And by
attacking someone so prominent, they hoped to lure Pulser into
(09:37):
punishing those responsible, which they hoped would trigger a revolt
among the rest of the Skipper's team. It seemed like
a sure thing after Jan said she recognized the voice
of one of her attackers and it was the high Bosen.
What a horrible plan. It was not a good plan
in in every possible respect it was. It was not
good to to plan to do that in the first place,
(09:59):
and also on top off of it being a terrible
thing to do, it didn't work. Uh. Pelser investigated the incident.
He we know he accepted her her assessment of who
had attacked her didn't punish anybody. Part of this is
because he was still pretty sick, even though he was
now recovering, and he also was starting to suspect that
(10:20):
maybe there was something bigger going on and he should
not get involved in it quite yet until he had
a better sense of exactly what was happening. Yes, so
he was kind of keeping his cards close to his vest,
so to speak. He didn't want to I didn't want
to incite the riot that he thought might be coming now.
But before they could come up with some of their
ploy to bring the Upper Merchant down, the mutineers plan
(10:43):
was spectacularly derailed because the ship was wrecked. Yes, before
we tell the story of the wreck, let's take another
moment for another word from our sponsor. Now back to
our story. On June four, a couple of hours before
Dawn Pelser, who would this point, was still not well.
He was in his bunk but awake. He felt a
(11:04):
quote rough, terrible movement, the bumping of the ship's rudder,
and then he felt the ships strike rocks so hard
that he was knocked out of his bunk. Because they
were not really anticipating that they were suddenly going to
run into land. They were traveling at full speed when
they struck this reef and huge waves and a bit
(11:26):
really heavy wind continued to just pound on the ship
and push it harder and harder against the rock. Pelser
ran on deck to see that there were breakers all
around them, and according to his journal, he said to
Yakubs skipper, what have you done that, through your reckless carelessness,
you have run this noise around our necks. The crew
really scrambled to try to lighten the ship. They threw
(11:46):
cannons overboard, they felt the masts, and they started sounding
the depths to try to find a way that they
might be able to work the ship back into deeper water.
But it was no use. The ship was stuck, and
on top of that, they really did know where they were.
This part of the sea was virtually uncharted by Europeans
at this point. And on top of all that, when
they felled the main mest of the ship, it came
(12:09):
down in a different direction than they were expecting, and
it crushed everything in its path all the way down.
So their effort to lighten the ship just broke it worse.
It was only after some discussion that Pelzer and Jacobs
decided they must be in the Hootman Abrolhos Islands, which
is a long chain of islands about forty kilometers off
the western coast of Australia. Their name comes from Portuguese abrojos,
(12:31):
or open eyes, and it got its name after the
Dutch East India Company vessel Door Direct stumbled upon them
about ten years earlier, and the crew believed that they
were in open ocean, and then suddenly reef and islands
were everywhere. And these islands are as you can imagine,
treacherous for ships. Uh more than sixty vessels are known
to have been lost among them, and at this point
(12:52):
in history Europeans had not explored or charted all of this,
and they're so far off the coast that they were
likely completely unexplored by Australia's Aboriginal people's as well. So
kind of just a big mystery danger sitting out there
in the ocean. Yeah, that's why they got that name
about keeping your eyes open. There's another collection of islands
(13:12):
off the coast of South America with the same name
for the same reason, like people venturing into them believing
they were in totally open ocean and then whoa, not
so much islands everywhere. So after the wreck, about a
hundred and eighty people were removed from the ship and
taken away in boats. This included about thirty women and children,
and about seventy men stayed on board, including under merchant Cornelis.
(13:35):
Most of the survivors made their way to an island
which was later named Beacon Island, while the commander of
the captain and about forty other men went to an
island that was nearer the shipwreck and that later came
to be known as Traders Island. But the party split
up this way. The majority of the survivors at this
point very panicked and in poor health from the length
of their journey. We're on an island by themselves, and
(13:58):
no one was really in charge. Yeah, you had basically
civilians and the rank and file crew off on an
island by themselves, with no leadership, no leadership, and on
top of that, no supplies. So the men who stayed
on board the Batavia, who were overall the sedy ist
and most disreputable of everyone on board, largely amused themselves
(14:22):
by drinking, plundering the ship's stores, looting things for themselves,
and attacking anybody who came to the ship to try
to salvage supplies from it. A delightful bunch. Uh. The
crew did manage to get some provisions off the ship,
but it was not enough to sustain them for very long,
and these islands were basically barren. There were some birds,
(14:44):
there were some fish, and there were some sea lions
that they could eat, but almost nothing in the way
of water or shelter. So it was more like they
were stuck on a big chunk of coral and rock,
just sticking out of the ocean. And because this larger
group of survivors just became more and more desperate as
time went on, the officers started to balk at the
idea of trying to get supplies from the ship to
(15:05):
the island where most of the survivors were. It started
to become really risky, like there was a genuine risk
that panicked survivors were going to mob the boat and
capsize it and possibly destroy the cargo or the boat
itself or kill the crew. So after a while it
was like, we're just we're just not gonna mess with
them on that island because we're scared of them. Just
(15:31):
keeps getting worse. I know, it's awful. There are so
many just callous and horrible moves made along the way
that it's it's hard to Yeah, you don't. There's not
really a lot of people to root for. The officers
debated at this point what to do, because staying where
they were seemed completely hopeless. Once the storms that had
driven them into the islands cleared, they didn't have a
(15:53):
source of fresh water unless it started raining again. Uh,
and they would need just enough to provide water without
threatening their lives. Or an equally unlikely scenario, if the
hull of the ship broke apart and the current happened
to carry all of the ship's stores directly to the islands. Uh,
they might get some relief. So what they did was
they decided to start scouting the islands and the mainland
(16:16):
for sources of water. So Pelsert, most of the officers,
and some crew and passengers, including two women in a baby,
went searching for water. This wasn't really Pelsert's idea. He
was sort of feeling like at this point it was
his job to stay with the survivors and to die
with them if that was what happened. His job as
a per merchant also involved the responsibility for making sure
(16:39):
the cargo stayed safe, and so he was really reluctant
to leave it behind, like his priority was definitely more
on the cargo than the people in terms of his
job description. But some of the sailors were pretty set
on trying to save themselves at whatever cost, and so
ultimately he went with them in the ship's longboat. Forty
eight total people went to look for water while they
(17:00):
stayed behind. Pretty much the only senior officer that was
not among the scouting party was Eronymous Cornelis back aboard
the Batavia. Their four day search for water was fruitless,
and finally Pilsert decided that the only possible way that
they were going to get out of this smith was
to go to Batavia for help. So they took their
(17:20):
long boat, which was about thirty ft long, and they
crossed nine hundred nautical miles of the open Indian Ocean.
Imagine Australia on a map, so the Hootman Abrojo's Islands
are about halfway down the straight ish part of the
western coast of Australia. Batavia is in Indonesia, and in
(17:43):
between them is just this long expanse of the Indian Ocean,
and that is what they were crossing. Yat and a
long boat that had like ten pairs of oars. I
think there are some shipwreck and mutiny survival stories that
are that involved long ocean crossings and remarkably small craft
(18:03):
in this, but still the fact that there there were
just these, all these people packed in the boat, including
two women in a baby. This astounding to me. Uh So,
to cuttle this part of the long story short, they
made it. It took them thirty three days to get there.
When they did get there, after thirty three days across
the ocean open, they had less than two pints of
(18:24):
fresh water left. And once they got to Batavia, Pelsart
charged the ship's high boson for outrageous behavior before the wreck,
because remember he was implicated in the sexual assault of
a passenger and he was executed, and skipper Yakovs was
arrested for negligence in causing the wreck. Pelser gathered supplies
and bordered the yachts Ardem and they headed back to
(18:45):
find the survivors. It took them sixty three days to
find them again, so basically twice as long months and
months of misery. So a whole lot happened on the
island in this three month in between when Pelser left
and when he got back with help, and probably the
survivors didn't even know they were heading out across the
(19:07):
Indian Ocean to begin with. They had no idea, but
they were just there three months, not knowing what was
going believing they had been abandoned. And that is the
story that we're going to talk about in the next
episode because as I discovered as I was researching this
crazy story, but they get long and involved. They do
when you're taking a long boat across the Indian Ocean
(19:29):
and when there is a shipwreck and a mutiny and
a masker. So we're going to continue the mutiny and
massacre part of this story in our next episode. In
the meantime, do you have listener mail me to have
some listener mail. Our listener mail is actually two comments
from our Facebook page in response to our recent episode
about Crucifixion in the in Greece and Room. The first
(19:53):
is from Tony, and Tony says, kind of sad that
you continue to push the myth that Jesus existed. You
admit there is no contemporary account his quote life, but
revert to the Christian normative position that he was real
sad position for quote historians, and the other is from Susannah,
who says, considering that there's zero evidence outside of the
New Testament, which was assembled beginning one of the existence
(20:14):
of Christ at all, I find it difficult to buy
any allegations that he was crucified. So I responded to
both of these on our Facebook page. But this is
actually something that you and I talked about when we
were recording whether we should address because we talk about
Jesus in a couple of places in our episode on Crucifixion,
we don't really talk about like Jesus has a historical figure, Yeah,
(20:38):
because that really, I mean, while that we mentioned in
the episode that was the most famous one everyone knows about,
that really wasn't what the episode was about. It was
about the practice that was taboo but still very common. Right.
You kind of can't talk about that without at least
mentioning said Jesus elements. And the general consensus among modern
historians is that they're Jesus is a real person who lived.
(21:03):
That's pretty much the the general consensus of today's scholars
of history. There are some people who debate this idea
based on some of the things that these a couple
of people commented on our Facebook page. Uh. But my point,
in the point that I made several times, is that
(21:24):
this same exact trait like there are not there's not
a first person, eye witness account of Jesus written down
during his lifetime, right. That is the case for many
many figures in antiquity. Um and and So if you're
if your rule for deciding that a person is real,
if that's your standard for what you need to have
(21:47):
to believe that a person is real, you're discounting many,
many historical figures from Greece and room. You're also discounting
the entire histories of cultures that kept their histories oral
rather than writing them down. Yeah. That often we're written
down by later culture when they either had it relaid
(22:07):
to them or discovered some element of yeah, of that culture.
So you can't kind of erase anything just because there's
not a first person contemporary account for it. So if
you would like to write to us on this or
any other topic, you can. We're at History Podcast at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at Misston History,
and our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com.
(22:27):
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and we have our very own website now at www
dot miss in history dot com. If you would like
to learn a little more about one of the things
we talked about in this episode, come to our website.
Our other website, how stuffworks dot com. Uh put how
to survive a shipwreck into the search bar and you
will find how to survive a shipwreck. Very helpful to
(22:50):
read an advance before you get on ship, just just
to put you out there be safe. You can do
all that in a whole lot more at how stepworks
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson. So we have our second shipwreck story
and as many weeks, and the Batavia was not just
(00:24):
a shipwreck. It's a shipwreck and a mutiny and also
a massacre. So this perfect storm of nautical carnage. Yeah,
there's a lot going on. Yeah, as you were researching,
Tracy would keeping some messages is like, this is crazy
because everything knew she would uncover would add another layer
(00:47):
of infanity to it. Yeah, it's it just escalates and escalates.
And there are a couple of notes that we're going
to just lay out in the beginning, and the first
is the names in this episode. So the main cast
of characters in the story came from what's now the
Netherlands and Belgium. And at this point in history, the
Dutch didn't generally use surnames the way most of us
are used to today. Instead of established surnames that were
(01:11):
passed down through the family and stayed the same, people
had patronymic names which came from their father's first names.
So Adrian Jacobs, who was our ship's skipper was Jacob's
son Adrian, and his father would have been Yacob somebody
else's son. Uh. But then our ship's upper merchant um
(01:34):
Francisco Pelser. He was from Antwerp, and he had a
more typical family surname that we would expect to see today,
which was Pelser. So for the sake of consistency, we're
just going to call everybody the equivalent of what their
surname was, because it gets a little confusing. The other
note is that you may notice as you are listening
to this episode and the next one, because the story
(01:55):
is so big, it's in two parts. Um. The number
of passengers and crew on the Ovat, these numbers don't
seem to quite add up all the time, and this
is because as the voyage went on, people were born,
other people died. Sometimes crew just went a wall. When
the ship would stop to take on supplies somewhere, people
would just decide they were done with this mess and
(02:17):
they would go away. Um. Even the starting number of
people on board is not totally clear because there were
some last minute no shows and people who just never
reported for duties. So if you're if you're doing the
math on this episode and you kind of go with
this numbers these don't You just don't sink that is why.
So today's episode is going to be about the first
(02:38):
part of the voyage, the shipwreck, and the rescue mission
that happened afterwards, and then our next episode will be
about sort of what happened to the survivors while their
bosses were away trying to get help. Ready, yeah, okay,
so this whole story starts with the Dutch East India
Company or in Dutch the verenegda Ostendesa Company. I practiced
(03:03):
that I probably still did not say it perfectly, So
we're just going to call them the v o C,
which is what that boils down to. So the v
C was dominating trade in the East Indies, which is
basically Indonesia and the surrounding islands in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It became this political and commercial powerhouse, and
it sent ships from the Netherlands to Asia to buy
(03:24):
things like spices and silk and then to return to
Europe to sell them. And the v C was headquartered
in Batavia, which is what's now Jakarta in Indonesia. One
of the v o C s ships, which was also
called the Batavia, left Tessel Holland on its maiden voyage
to Batavia in October of sixty eight, and its cargo
included an enormous amount of silver and jewels. The ship
(03:46):
also carried materials for a gatehouse which was to be
built at v O C headquarters. In command of the
Batavia was the upper Merchant, also called the Supercargo, and
this was a man named Francisco Pelsert, and he was
one of the most experienced merchants in the Dutch East
in the India Company's fleet. He was also very fond
of women and money, and at one point, sort of
(04:09):
extraneous to this story, set himself up as a money lender,
using company funds while charging people extremely steep interest. This
was something that was discovered after the end of the
Batavia's story, but it kind of clues you in to
a little about this man's character. Willing to misappropriate company funds,
(04:29):
that's no problem, right. Next in command was the ship's skipper,
Adrian Jacobs, who was a sea captain with more than
twenty years of experience, and he was in a rather
awkward leadership position because in any other nautical context he
would be the one ultimately in charge. However, on a
V O C ship he reported up to the upper merchant,
(04:50):
who was a merchant and not a seaman. This is
pretty much how things worked in most of the big
trading companies. You would have somebody who was ultimately in charge,
whose job was to safeguard the financial interests of the company.
Everyone ultimately reported to this person, even though this person
did not necessarily know how to sail a ship. So
(05:12):
that led to some headbutting in many contexts, not just
this one. I imagine we have um several listeners at
the moment thinking that this is very similar to some
corporate cultures. Yeah, not ours, I'm happy to report, but
it does happen. I mean I've certainly been in companies
where the person in charge it doesn't really know how
anything works. Yeah. I attempt one time for a company
(05:35):
where there was somebody who was in charge of I
T who had a history degree and they had been
hired because he was a people manager. But the people
who were working in I found that very frustrating. So
Jacobs and Pelser had actually sailed together before, and they
had never really gotten along, and their headbutting only got
worse after this incident, on a voyage where Pelser was
traveling as a guest, Jacobs had gotten extremely drunk and
(05:58):
insulted him in a very loud old way, and that
ship's upper merchant had given Jacobs a really public reprimand,
and Jacobs always blamed Pelsert for having gotten him dressed
down in front of everybody. Always a good relationship to
start along voyage with. Always good to blame other people
for your own behavior. Third in command was the under merchant,
(06:22):
Uronymous Cornelis, who had very little experience at see and
we'll talk a little bit more about his backstory as
we go on, because it becomes really really relevant later
on in the tale. Yeah, his his story is is
really relevant to part two, So it's in part two
of the episode. Gotch So. Also on board the Batavia
(06:42):
were about three and forty other people, and about two
thirds of them were officers and crew of the ship.
They're also about a hundred soldiers along with some civilians
seeking passage to the Indies, and some of these were
women and children. These were mostly families of voc employees
or other people who were going to join their family
in the Indian ease and before we talk about the
(07:03):
voyage itself, shall we take a moment and talk about
a word from our sponsor, Capital Idea. And now we
will get back to the journey of the Batavia. The
Batavia left Tessil in a convoy of seven ships, but
at the very start of the voyage they went through
a huge storm in the North Sea and most of
the ships lost sight of each other. Only three of
(07:23):
them managed to find one another again. Once the weather
had improved, the Batavia, ass and dev and the Burin
sailed on together towards South Africa. These three ships made
really good time. They got to the Cape of Good
Hope an entire month ahead of schedule. But on board
the Batavia, the under merchant Cord Cornelis and the shipper
(07:45):
Yakubs started to conspire to commit mutiny um. They also
drew the ship's high Boson into their plot as well,
and so as the ship departed from South Africa, in
order to further their plan of mutiny, Jacobs deliberately steered
the ship away from the two remaining ones in the convoy,
and so the Batavia wounded up going on the rest
(08:06):
of its journey alone. And then during the last stretch
of the Batavia's route northward through the Indian Ocean, Upper
Merchant Pelser became seriously ill and had to be confined
to his cabin under the care of the surgeon Franz Yawns.
At this point, Jacobs and Cornelis put their plotting on hold.
They were kind of enjoying Pelsart's absence and biding their
(08:28):
time and waiting to see if he would just die
and leave the ship in their hands. They weren't sort
of an interesting attitude to have about it. They weren't
going to have to put the effort into staging a
mutiny if the you know, the Upper Merchant was just
gonna die. Yeah, it takes some work. Yeah, so uh
sadly thwarting their plans. Eventually, Pelser recovered, and when it
(08:50):
became clear that he was going to live, Jacobs and
Cornelis realized that they had wasted some time and getting
their whole mutiny plan off the ground. They hadn't recruited
an enough men to physically take over the ship from
the people who would be loyal to the Upper Merchant,
so they decided to have another ploy. They conspired to
have a wealthy female passenger named Lucretia Yawns or you
(09:14):
all also see her name as Lucretia Vandermilion, which was
her husband's last name. They conspired to have her sexually
assaulted by masked members of the crew, and Jans was
traveling to Batavia to join her husband, and her station
was high enough that she had one of the best
cabins on the ship and her own maid. And by
attacking someone so prominent, they hoped to lure Pulser into
(09:37):
punishing those responsible, which they hoped would trigger a revolt
among the rest of the Skipper's team. It seemed like
a sure thing after Jan said she recognized the voice
of one of her attackers and it was the high Bosen.
What a horrible plan. It was not a good plan
in in every possible respect it was. It was not
good to to plan to do that in the first place,
(09:59):
and also on top off of it being a terrible
thing to do, it didn't work. Uh. Pelser investigated the incident.
He we know he accepted her her assessment of who
had attacked her didn't punish anybody. Part of this is
because he was still pretty sick, even though he was
now recovering, and he also was starting to suspect that
(10:20):
maybe there was something bigger going on and he should
not get involved in it quite yet until he had
a better sense of exactly what was happening. Yes, so
he was kind of keeping his cards close to his vest,
so to speak. He didn't want to I didn't want
to incite the riot that he thought might be coming now.
But before they could come up with some of their
ploy to bring the Upper Merchant down, the mutineers plan
(10:43):
was spectacularly derailed because the ship was wrecked. Yes, before
we tell the story of the wreck, let's take another
moment for another word from our sponsor. Now back to
our story. On June four, a couple of hours before
Dawn Pelser, who would this point, was still not well.
He was in his bunk but awake. He felt a
(11:04):
quote rough, terrible movement, the bumping of the ship's rudder,
and then he felt the ships strike rocks so hard
that he was knocked out of his bunk. Because they
were not really anticipating that they were suddenly going to
run into land. They were traveling at full speed when
they struck this reef and huge waves and a bit
(11:26):
really heavy wind continued to just pound on the ship
and push it harder and harder against the rock. Pelser
ran on deck to see that there were breakers all
around them, and according to his journal, he said to
Yakubs skipper, what have you done that, through your reckless carelessness,
you have run this noise around our necks. The crew
really scrambled to try to lighten the ship. They threw
(11:46):
cannons overboard, they felt the masts, and they started sounding
the depths to try to find a way that they
might be able to work the ship back into deeper water.
But it was no use. The ship was stuck, and
on top of that, they really did know where they were.
This part of the sea was virtually uncharted by Europeans
at this point. And on top of all that, when
they felled the main mest of the ship, it came
(12:09):
down in a different direction than they were expecting, and
it crushed everything in its path all the way down.
So their effort to lighten the ship just broke it worse.
It was only after some discussion that Pelzer and Jacobs
decided they must be in the Hootman Abrolhos Islands, which
is a long chain of islands about forty kilometers off
the western coast of Australia. Their name comes from Portuguese abrojos,
(12:31):
or open eyes, and it got its name after the
Dutch East India Company vessel Door Direct stumbled upon them
about ten years earlier, and the crew believed that they
were in open ocean, and then suddenly reef and islands
were everywhere. And these islands are as you can imagine,
treacherous for ships. Uh more than sixty vessels are known
to have been lost among them, and at this point
(12:52):
in history Europeans had not explored or charted all of this,
and they're so far off the coast that they were
likely completely unexplored by Australia's Aboriginal people's as well. So
kind of just a big mystery danger sitting out there
in the ocean. Yeah, that's why they got that name
about keeping your eyes open. There's another collection of islands
(13:12):
off the coast of South America with the same name
for the same reason, like people venturing into them believing
they were in totally open ocean and then whoa, not
so much islands everywhere. So after the wreck, about a
hundred and eighty people were removed from the ship and
taken away in boats. This included about thirty women and children,
and about seventy men stayed on board, including under merchant Cornelis.
(13:35):
Most of the survivors made their way to an island
which was later named Beacon Island, while the commander of
the captain and about forty other men went to an
island that was nearer the shipwreck and that later came
to be known as Traders Island. But the party split
up this way. The majority of the survivors at this
point very panicked and in poor health from the length
of their journey. We're on an island by themselves, and
(13:58):
no one was really in charge. Yeah, you had basically
civilians and the rank and file crew off on an
island by themselves, with no leadership, no leadership, and on
top of that, no supplies. So the men who stayed
on board the Batavia, who were overall the sedy ist
and most disreputable of everyone on board, largely amused themselves
(14:22):
by drinking, plundering the ship's stores, looting things for themselves,
and attacking anybody who came to the ship to try
to salvage supplies from it. A delightful bunch. Uh. The
crew did manage to get some provisions off the ship,
but it was not enough to sustain them for very long,
and these islands were basically barren. There were some birds,
(14:44):
there were some fish, and there were some sea lions
that they could eat, but almost nothing in the way
of water or shelter. So it was more like they
were stuck on a big chunk of coral and rock,
just sticking out of the ocean. And because this larger
group of survivors just became more and more desperate as
time went on, the officers started to balk at the
idea of trying to get supplies from the ship to
(15:05):
the island where most of the survivors were. It started
to become really risky, like there was a genuine risk
that panicked survivors were going to mob the boat and
capsize it and possibly destroy the cargo or the boat
itself or kill the crew. So after a while it
was like, we're just we're just not gonna mess with
them on that island because we're scared of them. Just
(15:31):
keeps getting worse. I know, it's awful. There are so
many just callous and horrible moves made along the way
that it's it's hard to Yeah, you don't. There's not
really a lot of people to root for. The officers
debated at this point what to do, because staying where
they were seemed completely hopeless. Once the storms that had
driven them into the islands cleared, they didn't have a
(15:53):
source of fresh water unless it started raining again. Uh,
and they would need just enough to provide water without
threatening their lives. Or an equally unlikely scenario, if the
hull of the ship broke apart and the current happened
to carry all of the ship's stores directly to the islands. Uh,
they might get some relief. So what they did was
they decided to start scouting the islands and the mainland
(16:16):
for sources of water. So Pelsert, most of the officers,
and some crew and passengers, including two women in a baby,
went searching for water. This wasn't really Pelsert's idea. He
was sort of feeling like at this point it was
his job to stay with the survivors and to die
with them if that was what happened. His job as
a per merchant also involved the responsibility for making sure
(16:39):
the cargo stayed safe, and so he was really reluctant
to leave it behind, like his priority was definitely more
on the cargo than the people in terms of his
job description. But some of the sailors were pretty set
on trying to save themselves at whatever cost, and so
ultimately he went with them in the ship's longboat. Forty
eight total people went to look for water while they
(17:00):
stayed behind. Pretty much the only senior officer that was
not among the scouting party was Eronymous Cornelis back aboard
the Batavia. Their four day search for water was fruitless,
and finally Pilsert decided that the only possible way that
they were going to get out of this smith was
to go to Batavia for help. So they took their
(17:20):
long boat, which was about thirty ft long, and they
crossed nine hundred nautical miles of the open Indian Ocean.
Imagine Australia on a map, so the Hootman Abrojo's Islands
are about halfway down the straight ish part of the
western coast of Australia. Batavia is in Indonesia, and in
(17:43):
between them is just this long expanse of the Indian Ocean,
and that is what they were crossing. Yat and a
long boat that had like ten pairs of oars. I
think there are some shipwreck and mutiny survival stories that
are that involved long ocean crossings and remarkably small craft
(18:03):
in this, but still the fact that there there were
just these, all these people packed in the boat, including
two women in a baby. This astounding to me. Uh So,
to cuttle this part of the long story short, they
made it. It took them thirty three days to get there.
When they did get there, after thirty three days across
the ocean open, they had less than two pints of
(18:24):
fresh water left. And once they got to Batavia, Pelsart
charged the ship's high boson for outrageous behavior before the wreck,
because remember he was implicated in the sexual assault of
a passenger and he was executed, and skipper Yakovs was
arrested for negligence in causing the wreck. Pelser gathered supplies
and bordered the yachts Ardem and they headed back to
(18:45):
find the survivors. It took them sixty three days to
find them again, so basically twice as long months and
months of misery. So a whole lot happened on the
island in this three month in between when Pelser left
and when he got back with help, and probably the
survivors didn't even know they were heading out across the
(19:07):
Indian Ocean to begin with. They had no idea, but
they were just there three months, not knowing what was
going believing they had been abandoned. And that is the
story that we're going to talk about in the next
episode because as I discovered as I was researching this
crazy story, but they get long and involved. They do
when you're taking a long boat across the Indian Ocean
(19:29):
and when there is a shipwreck and a mutiny and
a masker. So we're going to continue the mutiny and
massacre part of this story in our next episode. In
the meantime, do you have listener mail me to have
some listener mail. Our listener mail is actually two comments
from our Facebook page in response to our recent episode
about Crucifixion in the in Greece and Room. The first
(19:53):
is from Tony, and Tony says, kind of sad that
you continue to push the myth that Jesus existed. You
admit there is no contemporary account his quote life, but
revert to the Christian normative position that he was real
sad position for quote historians, and the other is from Susannah,
who says, considering that there's zero evidence outside of the
New Testament, which was assembled beginning one of the existence
(20:14):
of Christ at all, I find it difficult to buy
any allegations that he was crucified. So I responded to
both of these on our Facebook page. But this is
actually something that you and I talked about when we
were recording whether we should address because we talk about
Jesus in a couple of places in our episode on Crucifixion,
we don't really talk about like Jesus has a historical figure, Yeah,
(20:38):
because that really, I mean, while that we mentioned in
the episode that was the most famous one everyone knows about,
that really wasn't what the episode was about. It was
about the practice that was taboo but still very common. Right.
You kind of can't talk about that without at least
mentioning said Jesus elements. And the general consensus among modern
historians is that they're Jesus is a real person who lived.
(21:03):
That's pretty much the the general consensus of today's scholars
of history. There are some people who debate this idea
based on some of the things that these a couple
of people commented on our Facebook page. Uh. But my point,
in the point that I made several times, is that
(21:24):
this same exact trait like there are not there's not
a first person, eye witness account of Jesus written down
during his lifetime, right. That is the case for many
many figures in antiquity. Um and and So if you're
if your rule for deciding that a person is real,
if that's your standard for what you need to have
(21:47):
to believe that a person is real, you're discounting many,
many historical figures from Greece and room. You're also discounting
the entire histories of cultures that kept their histories oral
rather than writing them down. Yeah. That often we're written
down by later culture when they either had it relaid
(22:07):
to them or discovered some element of yeah, of that culture.
So you can't kind of erase anything just because there's
not a first person contemporary account for it. So if
you would like to write to us on this or
any other topic, you can. We're at History Podcast at
Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at Misston History,
and our tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com.
(22:27):
Our Pinterest is pinterest dot com, slash missed in History,
and we have our very own website now at www
dot miss in history dot com. If you would like
to learn a little more about one of the things
we talked about in this episode, come to our website.
Our other website, how stuffworks dot com. Uh put how
to survive a shipwreck into the search bar and you
will find how to survive a shipwreck. Very helpful to
(22:50):
read an advance before you get on ship, just just
to put you out there be safe. You can do
all that in a whole lot more at how stepworks
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it has stuff works that comed this. Equal Monsters
(23:22):
to existed a life, Animal Planets, River Monsters returns with
an all new season the Amazon the one place whose
mysteries keep calling me. By here, I've seen many monsters
I've yet to see. There is my last. River Monsters.
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